


Blood, Sweat and Alison's Garden Party

by satonawall



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-08
Updated: 2015-04-08
Packaged: 2018-03-21 23:09:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3707047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/satonawall/pseuds/satonawall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vague-future-after-no-one’s-after-them-roll-with-it-pls AU: Allison decides to organise a garden party. Sarah’s… not into it, okay?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blood, Sweat and Alison's Garden Party

“A party?” Her mouth was hung open after the words were out; Sarah closed it as soon as she realised. “A bloody suburban garden party?”  
  
“Yeah,” Cosima said, swinging her foot like it wasn’t weird at all. “I mean, it’s Alison, who’s really surprised here? She’s a soccer mum, it’s what they do.”  
  
“Right.” Sarah dumped two packets of sugar into her coffee. “Of course, sure, all soccer mums invite their freaky clone twins to a garden party in their creepily pristine suburban neighbourhood. That makes sense.”  
  
Cosima blew at the surface of her hot chocolate. “It could be cool. Delphine’s making macarons.”  
  
It was good she didn’t have any coffee in her mouth; she’d have spat it out. “Cool? Have you met Alison?”  
  
Cosima smiled at her. “You’re coming, right? It would mean a lot.”  
  
Sarah shrugged her shoulders and reached for a third packet of sugar.  
  
“Fine, fine,” she said. “I’ll come to the bloody party, but if I have to dress up as Alison again to blend in, I’m leaving.”

—  
  
“Alison’s party?” Felix said as he stood back to check the painting on the wall was hanging at the exact angle he wanted. “Oh, I’m definitely going.”  
  
From the sofa where she’d slumped the moment she arrived, Sarah groaned.  
“Is that all everyone can talk about nowadays? Great, we’ve no corporate giants and military monsters running after us anymore, let’s make up a new one!”  
  
“It’s not gonna be that bad.” Felix straddled the armrest of one of his chairs.   
“It’s Alison, at least there’ll be lots of food. You like free food.”  
  
Sarah shrugged. It was true. She might have a legit job now, and a long-term lease on a flat with a shower that worked, but free food was free food.  
  
There was a knock on the door. Sarah had always got a bit of a scary vibe from Alison, but she’d never thought her a psychic. There she was, though, standing at the door and smiling like she knew they’d been talking about her.  
  
Or then she was just imagining things. It wasn’t paranoia if you were right, right?  
  
“Oh, Sarah, I thought I might find you here,” Alison said. “I need Helena’s phone number.”  
  
Sarah raised her head to see Alison better, but the position hurt her neck so she slumped back down.  
  
“She doesn’t have one,” she said. “Why?”  
  
Alison moved a pile of books onto Felix’s coffee table and sat down gingerly at the edge of the chair.  
  
“I need to invite her to my garden party. You received my message, I assume?”  
Sarah snorted. She had received the message alright. Alison must have spent at least half a day working on it on Photoshop. It was kind of nice in all its middle-class normal glory with its distinctive suburban stench.  
  
“Are you sure?”  
  
“Of course I am sure,” Alison said, more than a hint of impatience creeping into her tone. “I am inviting everyone. If you know how to get in contact with Tony, that would also be-”  
  
“I don’t.” She hoped Felix didn’t either; it was bad enough to go to a suburban garden party with all the people she knew from the area; if Alison would actually track someone down from hundreds of miles away she couldn’t actually take it.  
  
“But you will invite Helena, won’t you?”  
  
Alison’s voice was a little tight, which Sarah could well understand; under normal circumstances, Helena would never have been invited into one of Alison’s parties. There was nothing normal about secretly being a clone, though.  
  
“Okay,” she said and closed her eyes, hoping that would make Alison leave. “I’ll invite Helena.”  
  
—  
  
They met at McDonald’s. Sarah had never been really surprised that Helena had taken to Happy Meal like a duck to water.  
  
“A party?” Helena repeated, her mouth half full.  
  
“Swallow before you speak,” Sarah said, pushing her Coke from one hand to the other. “Yeah, a party. A garden party.”  
  
Helena swallowed and stuffed a dozen chips into her mouth. “She wants me there?”  
  
Probably not particularly, but Alison was weird like that. It was probably part of some bizarro suburban code. You had to invite people you didn’t like. “She wants everyone there.”  
  
“A sestra party.” Helena reached for Sarah’s chips, and Sarah didn’t stop her. She wasn’t hungry anyway. “I’ve never been to any other. The nuns were not good with that.”  
  
“Trust me, it’s going to be a lot different than dancing at Felix’s place.” Sarah pushed her burger towards Helena too. She ate like she hadn’t in a while. Then again, she always did that. “Alison’s going to wear a floral dress, I just know it. And a headband. And she’ll make you eat finger food and Donnie will grill.”  
  
“Finger food,” Helena said and pushed her thumb into her mouth. “Finger food with sestras.”  
  
Sarah raised her gaze up at the ceiling. “I regret ever meeting any of you.”  
  
—  
  
“Wow,” she said, looking at the rainforest diorama. “And you made this all by yourself?”  
  
“Mrs S applied the glue.” Kira’s eyes were shining. “Put I put the pieces where they belong.”  
  
“Monkey, it’s just-” Sarah smiled. “It’s wonderful.”  
  
“Ms Wilson says we’re doing tundras next.” Kira looked up at her. “Will you help me?”  
  
“Of course.” She would, even if she’d have to quit her job to make it. She only had it for Kira, anyway. “Just say when, and I’ll be there.”  
  
Mrs S smiled at her from the kitchen. “Are you staying for dinner, Sarah?”  
  
“Yeah, I don’t-”  
  
Her phone rang.  
  
“It’s Alison,” Sarah said after checking the caller ID. “I’ll have to take it, she’ll just let it ring until I answer.”  
  
Kira nodded and went back to running her finger along the anaconda’s back.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Would you mind picking up some chips for the party?” Alison sounded even more snippy than usual; she was probably busy. Sarah wondered what it would be like to get so worked up over organising a small party. “The kids are always telling me that my choices are not very tasty.”  
  
Sarah sat back in her chair and frowned. “They all taste the same to me. Unless you want like something special, but like I only know the frozen kind-”  
  
She could practically hear the frown that probably looked quite identical to hers. “Why would you want to freeze chips?”  
  
Ah. Of course. She was used to this, and she was usually better at catching it, but Alison had been getting on her nerves with all this garden party business. No wonder she slipped.  
  
“You mean crisps, you should say crisps,” she said more tartly than she would have otherwise. “Fine. I’ll get you your bl-” Kira looked up like she knew what Sarah had been about to say. “Your crisps.”  
  
Alison probably bought some low-fat crap anyway, she thought as she hung up. No wonder her kids didn’t trust her taste.  
  
“Sorry,” she said and pushed her phone back into her jacket pocket. “Auntie Alison just wanted to ask a favour. She’s having a party.”  
  
“I know.” Kira smiled brightly. “We’re coming too! She said I would meet Gemma and Oscar and that they’re really nice even though they’re younger than I am.”  
  
Sarah did not say the first thing that came to her mind.  
  
“Really?” she said instead, speaking as much to Mrs S as to Kira.  
  
“Alison dropped by yesterday,” Mrs S said and looked down at the frying pan with a smile that told Sarah she found the situation too funny. “It’s hard to refuse her.”  
  
“I bet you didn’t even try,” Sarah muttered under her breath but didn’t repeat it when Kira asked.  
  
—  
  
Would you please buy disposable plates? The ones with periwinkles are the best quality in my experience.  
  
Sarah looked at the text again, and then at the disposable plates in front of her. Then she looked down at her phone again and googled periwinkles.  
  
Who’d have thought there would be at least three different types of disposable plates with flower decorations?  
  
“Sarah!”  
  
She jumped a little, but she already had a smile on her face when she turned around. “Art! Hi.”  
  
Art looked at the shelf behind her and raised an eyebrow.  
  
“Throwing a party?”  
  
“No, not me.” She made a face. He knew Alison; he ought to sympathise. “Alison’s having a garden party. She wants me to buy the plates because her kids have football practice.”  
  
Art’s face cleared. “The one on Sunday? Yeah, I’m looking forwards to it.”  
  
Maybe she shouldn’t have been surprised, but that didn’t stop her groan. “Really? She invited you, too? What’s this going to be, the get-together of the millennium?”  
  
Art didn’t laugh, but he looked like he really wanted to. When had Sarah’s pain become so funny to everyone who knew her?  
  
“You better not miss it then,” he said, and then he was off.  
  
—  
  
“I’m so close to just-” She made a vague but loud noise; Cosima probably understood what she meant. “I can be a good mother for Kira without having to- I don’t know, be Alison. She threatens people with guns while her children are sleeping upstairs!”  
  
“No one’s asked you to be like Alison,” Cosima said as she looked up from whatever her actual work was that she was procrastinating from by talking to Sarah. “And besides, have you noticed no one’s forced you to do anything?”  
Sarah thought about the crisps and the plates that were taking up almost half of her tiny kitchen table and shook her head.  
  
—  
  
“No, no, Donnie, first the steaks, then the mushrooms, or they’ll get all gummy and unpleasant while they cool down!”  
  
“I know someone who should cool down,” Sarah muttered under her breath as she took a sip of her Coke as Donnie obediently stepped away from the grill and let Alison do what she wanted to it.  
  
“She’s right, though,” Felix said and popped a carrot stick into his mouth. “They do get gross if they have to wait.”  
  
Sarah shot him an unimpressed look.  
  
“You have to admit, though,” Felix added after a moment of silence, “it’s not nearly as bad as you thought it would be. It’s actually pretty good.”  
  
Sarah gritted her teeth, mostly because she couldn’t argue with that. Kira, Gemma and Oscar were drawing pictures (she didn’t know what, but when she’d passed them earlier they’d been in a spirited argument about the length of T-Rex’s hands, so probably just normal kid stuff and not, say, deeply traumatic stuff about so many women who looked like their mothers) and laughing at Helena who was taking turns telling them about Ukrainian nuns and emptying her full plate of food. Back at the grill, Mrs S had joined Alison and while Sarah could not hear the words, she heard just enough to catch the tone, that soothing voice that had been very reassuring to her as a child and apparently still worked on adults, if the way Alison took deep breaths and then smiled was any indication. Having been exiled from his grilling duties, Donnie had joined Delphine by the swing where they appeared to be talking about gardening. Art and Cosima were by the drinks table, creating the weirdest and probably most disgusting juice and soft drink mixes ever and apparently having great fun testing them.  
  
It wasn’t a complete train wreck, she conceded. And for all her faults, Alison really did bake a mean apple pie.  
  
“I want a piece of that,” Felix said as Cosima said ‘ewww’ particularly loudly and looked like she wanted to spit out whatever green-ish brown concoction it was that she had on her hand.  
  
Sarah watched as he traipsed over there, and only when he was gone, she gave her plate a small smile that no one hopefully noticed.  
  
“Told you so,” Art said as he sat down next to Sarah.  
  
“Told you what?” Sarah asked.  
  
“You’d have been sad to miss it.”  
  
“There’s still time for Alison to blow a gasket and burn the house down.”  
  
Art reached across the table to take a macaron. “Things have really changed for you since we met, huh?”  
  
She’d wanted to do it a lot the past couple of weeks, but Sarah finally gave into the impulse to rest her forehead against the table.  
  
“Don’t start.”  
  
“You really found your family,” Art said and then mercifully stood up, pushing the macaron into his mouth and thus not talking anymore.  
  
Sarah glared daggers at him and shook her head, but five minutes later when Kira loudly yelled Cosima’s name to ask her to come and tell Gemma who was right about the triceratops’s feet, she did smile.  
  
Yeah, things definitely had changed for her. And overwhelmingly, it was for the better. That was probably reason enough to have a garden party.


End file.
